In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has complicated conventional representations of Black Power in the United States. Historians have produced biographies of civil rights leaders, social histories of postwar civil rights organizations, intellectual histories of black liberation thought, and new studies of the Black Panther Party that undermine the artificial structures traditionally used to frame and demarcate civil rights activism and Black Power resistance.1 Building upon the memoirs of Panther members and political prisoners, and new examinations of urban politics, recent historiography has provided students with a deeper appreciation of the oppression faced by black people in the United States, the politicization of black communities, and the freedom dreams of activists.2

Despite the growing interest in the politics of black radicalism, the editors of Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle explain that the vital contributions and radical political perspectives of black women remain largely overlooked. In the introduction to this compilation of essays, the editors Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard state: “Although, a new generation of scholars has greatly expanded our knowledge of black radicalism and the black freedom struggle, they have left intact a ‘leading man’ master narrative that misses crucial dimensions of the postwar freedom struggle and minimizes the contributions of women. Such histories have neglected crucial dimensions of the postwar black radical tradition that held black women’s self-emancipation as pivotal to black liberation” (p. 2).

“Second-wave feminism” and other analytical frameworks commonly used to examine radical feminist activism also obscure the intersectional understanding of power that many black women brought into the movement circles and organizations they worked in. The consequence, the editors explain, is that the scope of black radicalism continues to be limited, models of male leadership remain intact, and black women are overlooked as figures of revolutionary resistance.

Aiming to correct the blind-spots in movement historiography, Want to Start a Revolution? is comprised of fourteen new essays that center on leading female activists who made major contributions to freedom struggles of the postwar era. The first half of the anthology recovers the life histories and political careers of Esther Cooper Jackson, Juanita and Lillie Jackson, Vicki Garvin, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Rosa Parks. Contributing authors reveal that these women challenged notions of female decency through their political activities. They were students of radical theory, accomplished writers and editors, cultural producers, skilled organizers and charismatic speakers. As movement care-takers they were community builders, and masters at creating activist networks. Providing rich details about their early lives and the longevity of their political careers, each essay demonstrates that black women were central figures, tireless workers, and outspoken voices in popular front, civil rights, pan-African, and black nationalist movements. In the cases of Garvin and Shirley Graham Du Bois, their lifelong anti-imperialist political commitments eventually took them to Algeria, Ghana, China, and other Third World countries, where they became recognizable figures of Third World revolution.

Gender politics and the efforts of black women to create a space for intersectional struggle during the late 1960s and 1970s are the subjects of the chapters that follow. Each essay reveals the ability of radical black women to reconcile the seemingly antagonistic contradictions of nationalist and feminist movements through their intersectional understanding of oppression. Black feminist thought is revisited in a close reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s classic anthology The Black Woman (1970), and an analysis of the political career of radical lawyer Florynce Kennedy. Chapters about Assata Shakur and the Oakland Community School highlight the gender politics of the Black Panther Party and the visionary leadership qualities that Panther women often demonstrated. The leading role of women in the Black Arts movement in Atlanta, the national welfare rights movement, and radical electoral politics are also examined in this volume. Finally, essays on the lives and solidarity work of Denise Oliver and Yuri Kochiyama complicate the notions that revolutionary organizations were racially exclusive and opposed to coalitions.

For the most part, authors creatively mix archival research, interviews, published writings, and the reflections of movement comrades to reveal the experiences and political perspectives of women. Joy James’s essay on Assata Shakur, and Margo Natalie Crawford’s piece on the The Black Woman are also noteworthy for integrating a literary analysis and exploring the questions of hybridity, representation, and essentialism. As is the case in all collections, some contributors to Want to Start a Revolution? are more effective than others in conveying the radical political commitments of the women they study. Certain essays, for example, would have benefited from greater attention to the voices of the activists, and their reflections on the meaning of their work, rather than simply identifying individual accomplishments and explaining their theoretical significance. This reviewer also wonders why the critical intervention of writing women into postwar black liberation history was not brought into conversation with important scholarship that also critiques the erasure of Third World women activists as related to the ongoing cultural politics of gender and colonialism.3 Finally, the strong focus on East Coast communities and organizations in many of the essays limits a comparative analysis of radicalism, women activists, and gender politics.

These minor shortcomings aside, Want to Start a Revolution? successfully meets its three goals of expanding the boundaries of black radicalism, shedding light on the labor women performed to sustain radical movements, and exploring the gender politics of black women activists (pp. 3-4). Collectively, the essays will provide activists, students, and academic specialists with powerful insights into post-World War II black freedom struggles, the de-colonial imaginary in black feminist thought, and the lives of women who joined and guided movements to transform an oppressive society. This collection will also be useful to teachers aiming to introduce students to the politics of historical memory, and the recent distortions of civil rights discourse. We owe a debt of gratitude to the editors and contributors to this collection for reminding us that in the postwar struggle for revolutionary change, as now, women of color hold up more than half the sky.

Monthly Review Essays

Historically, capitalism develops institutions and ideologies that justify surplus extraction and capital accumulation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the financialization of capitalism initiated a new era of accumulation which is known in academic contexts as finance-capital-driven neoliberalism.

Both Sweezy and Dimitrov agree that fascism arises in the middle class and becomes a threat when the bourgeoisie embraces it, but Sweezy’s unique contribution is to demonstrate fascism’s relationship to the postwar transitional period of class equilibrium.